The Prospects for Sustained Growth in Africa: Benchmarking the Constraints

Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Sloan School of Management, MIT. Jonathan D. Ostry is Deputy Director of the Research Department at the IMF. Arvind Subramanian is a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Work on this paper was undertaken while Johnson was a visiting scholar in the IMF's Research Department, and Subramanian was Assistant Director of the Macroeconomic Studies Division of the Research Department at the IMF. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF or IMF policy. This paper is a revision of a background paper prepared for the NBER's Africa meeting in April 2006 and was also presented at the Peterson Institute of International Economics. We thank participants, and particularly Fred Bergsten, Martin Feldstein, and Ben Jones, as well as colleagues at the IMF for helpful comments. We are grateful to Manzoor Gill and Murad Omoev for superb assistance with the data. The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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